Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Blog or Vlog?



Snow in Seattle.  What a winter.  This is my buddy's boat after our most recent snow"storm".  Schools closed and then next day, even though all the streets were clear, we had a two hour delay for all schools.
I have all but given up on blogs.  I used to follow almost thirty blogs and now that number is down to two.  I watch vlogs almost exclusively and I imagine that the viewership of this blog has dropped off dramatically especially as I hardly post anything here anymore.  I never did this blog for the viewers though, it was and is my personal record of my life that is whizzing by.  Will my kids read it?  Maybe.  I doubt it though.  But at least I won't saddle them with a ton of photo albums and stacks of papers that they will have to dispose of when I die.  And people say I'm self-centered...
Tomorrow (Feb 9th) we go to the British Virgin Islands for a bit more than a week.  At 2200 tomorrow we will be wheels up to JFK and then to St. Thomas.  The flight to JFK is overnight and then, hopefully, with the kids in a sleep-deprived stupor, we can catch the flight to STT.  Catching this  flight depends almost exclusively on the snowstorm (not the kids) that is barreling towards NYC as I type this.
Airports.  I love them.  When I am at work and talk travel, I get the usual backlash about wait times and all that stuff.  I am old enough to remember when you could RUN through airports to catch your flight!  No security lines.  Nothing.  Get out of your car and run to the gate.  It really wasn't that long ago.  Thinking of travel as a privilege helps.  Pay your fare ( it is cheap as hell compared to what it was), be nice to the stewardess or steward and sit in a chair that eventually reaches 36.000 feet into the sky and wait till you land.  I mean it is damn near magical!  You are sitting in a chair, in the sky!!! 
Not that I ever showed up prepared.  Winged flight and I have had a rocky relationship.  It wan't that long ago that I had almost a 50/50 chance of making my destination back in my wild and woolly days.  Berlin?  Passport with no wallet.  Galapagos...well, I only talk about that when I'm face-to-face.  Generally though I was better at international flights than domestic.  Las Vegas was particularly hard for me to fly into and then out of.  No idea why.
Had my three month checkup last week.  Just me.  I think I swore that I would never do another checkup without someone there with me but things change.  It is a weird place that I am in right now.  Family here, friends here but yet...well, everything is fine so far as cancer goes.  So far.  Gold says CT scan in three months and we will see about that "spot on your liver and lung."  Both of which have grown in between scans.  Nothing to be done about that though.
So I will post a youtube link to the videos that the kids and I make during our trip here.  I think I might make three or four small videos about 4 minutes each rather than one large one.  My son Ben seems to want to do some video taping and I'll encourage that.  He asks me about me editing software and I'll include him on that as well.  Not sure if we will do voiceover, "live" voice or just music with subtitles.  We will see.  What the kids want and what they help with are two different things.
Here is our video channel